The Shipping News (2001)

Great Film overall

good back-story, and good acting

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Talk about a midlife crisis. Kevin Spacey's character, Quoyle, has one with such bizarre contributors as only a novelist could conjure up. Annie Proulx won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her 1993 novel of this same title. The story wreaks soap opera throughout except for its setting and a slower, more deliberate layout of the plot. Most soaps have that confined indoors look and feel, and the outdoors of Newfoundland in this film go against that. But the story is one huge melodrama. Drawn out and slowed down, but quite a melodrama. I first saw this film in the theater. Seeing it again years later, I have the same reaction. It's a strange story, maybe the start of a happy ending, but just sort of dull. This film doesn't have much life, but then that may be what the point is – at least at the start. I just don't find that sort of thing very enjoyable. I understand that some people may, and that's fine for them. It's passable mostly because of the setting and the good acting we see. Besides Spacey, principals are Julianne Moore as Wavey Prowse and Judi Dench as Aunt Agnis. I liked some of the minor performances as well – Pete Postlethwaite as Tert Card and native Newfoundlander Gordon Pinsent as Billy Pretty. This type of film isn't for everyone – even most folks perhaps. If one is in the doldrums, it's not recommended. If one is in a chipper mood, this might even nip that back a bit.

Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) is a meek man struggling in life after his domineering father. He falls for hard-partying Petal (Cate Blanchett) and they have daughter Bunny together. She sells the six-year old to illegal adoption for $6k and dies in a car crash with her boyfriend. Quoyle's father dies and his half-sister Agnis Hamm (Judi Dench) comes to steal his ashes. Quoyle decides to leave upstate New York to live in the ancestral Quoyle home in Newfoundland with Bunny. Despite being only an inksetter, local paper owner Jack Buggit (Scott Glenn) forces him to write the Shipping News and local car wrecks, real and fake. Tert Card (Pete Postlethwaite) is the hard editor. Beaufield Nutbeem (Rhys Ifans) and Billy Pretty (Gordon Pinsent) are fellow reporters. Quoyle falls for widowerer Wavey Prowse (Julianne Moore). Quoyle struggles to write in the morbid newspaper style until he writes about the Hitler boat. Jack gives him his own column.This is a story of pirates, outlandish tales, and shocking reveals of family traumas. The material is there for something with an unique voice. Kevin Spacey doesn't fit as the meek Quoyle. He's a great actor but he has to really act it up to be this much of a walkover. This movie struggles to find that appealing quirkiness out of these fascinating morbid tales.

Every actor and/or actress has at least one movie he/she wishes they could obliterate from their careers. I'm sure The Shipping News is Julianne Moore's.Considerng the budget they had for this movie, they could have afforded a coach that knew the difference between a Newfoundland accent and an Irish accent.The won't allow me to post my comment unless it contains 10 lines of text. I'm too polite to give my opinion on what other negative impressions this insult to Newfoundland Culture made on me. I'll just say that the chances of me wasting my time viewing such drivel again are about the same as a snowball's chance in hell.

This movie has everything the book couldn't capture. Stellar performances from all of the cast. Brilliant screen play based on a dark, enigmatic novel brings a little hope to the end of the day. You feel Newfoundland in this movie and you know the Atlantic perhaps better than you understood it in A Perfect Storm. There are curses to be overcome in this story and who better to lead you through them than Kevin Spacey with endearing performances from Gordon Pinsent, Pete Postlethwaite, Scott Glenn and Rhys Ifans. If you couldn't get through Annie Proulx' novel, you owe it to her and the crew of this movie to watch this! Lasse Hallström did well, boy!